Postural balance

A common misconception is that the Alexander technique is primarily concerned with improving posture, but both Jones (1976) and De Alcantara (1997) are of the opinion that the significant aspect of the Technique is not posture, but the movement pattern itself. Jones (1976: 190) suggests that the Alexander Technique “is not concerned with three dimensional but with four dimensional posture, in other words with movement”. De Alcantara (1997: 13) refers to “postural behaviour”, an idea that includes posture but goes beyond it to incorporate attitude and movement as well. People often move and react in unbalanced ways that they are unable to recognize, and as a result, become unable to achieve a balanced state of rest (Barlow, 1973: 66). Faulty muscular tension patterns, which lead to an unbalanced resting-state, are particularly obvious in the postures that are adopted when a person is not moving (Barlow, 1973: 68). These distorted postures sometimes become a person’s norm, and

67 “feel so right that a properly balanced use of the body may feel unnatural” (Barlow, 1973: 67). However, making someone self-aware about postural faults is not a solution, as it can lead to anxiety and an attempt to adopt a particular position. By facilitating an easier, non-habitual movement pattern through using the Alexander principle, posture itself inevitably improves (Jones, 1976: 191), as postural homeostasis, i.e. “the steady state in which the body keeps itself balanced” (Barlow, 1973: 70), is restored.

Barlow, 1973: 70:

Postural homeostasis involves a most intricate and delicate interplay of muscular co-ordinations throughout the body, to bring the body close to a balanced state. The balance which results from this interplay is what the physicists call ‘a steady resting state’, and in a healthy person these muscular adjustments will mesh together to give a balanced whole…Work is being done to maintain balance around a central point of stillness. The central point is not fixed. Oscillation takes place around it, with smaller, or bigger swings. Balance can be achieved in all manner of ways – many of them markedly inefficient, with too big an oscillation away from the central resting point. Such oscillation is characteristic of all our muscular activities.

While posture is often mistakenly understood to be a static bodily position that is held for some length of time, in reality there is no such thing as a right or fixed position - the best position is the one that can be altered quickly and with ease in order to respond to the continually changing demands of life (De Alcantara, 1997: 14). A proper stance is therefore not a “mechanical achievement of stability”, (Scott, as cited in De Alcantara, 1997: 110), but a dynamic balance from which it is possible to adapt to changing circumstances without interfering with the integrity of the primary control. Such a balanced stance is known in the Alexander Technique as a “position

of mechanical advantage” (Barlow, 1973: 202). Stein (1999) describes good posture as “an upward flow and a downward flow”: the

torso flows up from the hip joints, while the legs flow downward. As the head leads the spine into lengthening, the arms release out of the back, and the knees lead the legs out of the hip joints, creating an expansive flow in the body. When the legs are allowed to release away from the hips, the thighs and the lower back are freed, and the feet become grounded in fully supported contact with the floor. “This sense of grounding flows up the torso into the arms, neck, and shoulders and gives a greater

68 sense of freedom to the upper body” (Stein, 1999). Support for the upper body in activity therefore does not come from a static, fixed position, but “from a balanced skeleton that is constantly rebalanced by muscles in flow” (Stein, 1999).

It is important to note that the “appropriate muscle activity for postural support is not something we can do by simply trying harder”, as it involves reflex responses that maintain good posture almost effortlessly when they are working optimally (STAT, 1993). The supporting reflexes are stimulated by the gravitational force of the body through the feet to the ground, to which the body responds by lengthening up, provided that there is no interference (Dawley, 2001: 9). Postural reflexes are triggered more effectively when the tendency to hold tension in the feet is inhibited, and the feet allowed to rest more easily on the floor (Stevens, 1996: 101). “The effects of the supporting reactions in the legs…continue through the deep muscles of the hips, shoulders, trunk and neck”, and these deep muscles have special fibres that do not tire easily, unlike the outer layer of movement muscles (Stevens, 1996: 102). Consequently, when the supporting reflexes function optimally, there is less activity in the surface muscles and “less of a sense of effort or heaviness in the body” (Stevens, 1996: 102).

The reflex support system functions largely automatically, and although it cannot be sensed directly, it is the reflex that can most easily be interfered with (Stevens, 1996: 104). In order to compensate for the lack of balance in the body, the movement muscles (especially the larger and longer muscles of the back) will contract, and interference will consequently register as physical tension (Stevens, 1996: 103). The balance of the head and the upward-lengthening spine are especially important to ensure less interference with and optimal functioning of the supporting reflexes (Stevens, 1996: 106).

Carrington, as cited in Stevens, 1996: 17:

Our human upright posture is a unique accomplishment…a most delicate balance, an equation of forces brought about by an interplay of the sensory and motor mechanisms, by which all muscular effort is practically eliminated. The unique quality of the whole performance lies in this reduction of effort.

69 3.3.10 Attention and awareness

Although the benefits of the Alexander Technique are quite clear, what is not guaranteed is “the extent of the trainability of any given person, and their willingness to use what we can teach them” (Barlow, 1973: 217). In order to learn the Technique, one has to be able to sustain attention for at least a certain amount of time (Jones, 1976: 162). Changing habitual behaviour requires commitment and a very detailed attention to one’s use (Barlow, 1973. 203).

Barlow, 1973: 229:

It can never be a question of detecting faulty tension patterns once and for all, de-conditioning them by hypnosis and relaxation, and seeing them disappear. It is rather a matter of continually having to notice the tensions, in countless different situations, and gradually finding out the compensatory tensions, which, like layers of an onion, manifest themselves when succeeding layers have been stripped off.

Tension habits can only be unlearnt as they are noticed and dealt with at “each actual moment of behavioural reaction” (Barlow, 1973: 130), and this implies a certain amount of awareness and attention. Through increasing sensory awareness and learning to inhibit and direct, a consciously structured pattern of use is created that can eventually be applied to all activities. Awareness implies a unity of body and mind, a sense of being in touch with oneself (Barlow, 1973: 208), which is indispensable for learning to inhibit and direct one’s use. One becomes increasingly aware of shifts of muscle tension that are “as delicate as the finest touch of the violinist”, but as such directed thinking is initially fairly tenuous, “any fatigue or lessening of attention can put an end to it” (Barlow, 1973: 225). This process of critically sifting sensory feedback is an intrinsic part of all normal perception, to a greater or lesser degree (Barlow, 1973: 225), but one’s ability to be attentive is actively cultivated and increased through the Alexander Technique.

Barlow, 1973: 225:

We have usually taken it for granted that we can only use our minds in two deliberate ways – content thinking…and behaviour-control. But between content-thinking and overt behaviour there is another sphere of personal life, a vast world of existence to be managed by awareness and attention (although ‘managed’ is too forceful a term for the attentive living which is implied).

70 An extended field of concentration arises from the relationship between awareness and attention (Jones, 1976: 176). While awareness can be described as a “generalized alertness to present events” (Jones, 1976: 174), attention means to be concentrated on a particular aspect of this field (Jones, 1976: 176). The danger of concentration, as it is commonly understood, is that it narrows the field of attention so that everything other than the object of focus is excluded. De Alcantara (1997: 70) agrees that a mind that is concentrated in this limited sense is not truly an attentive mind. By expanding attention rather than narrowing it, one’s awareness becomes more widely inclusive, so that it is possible to take in the key relationships in the body, the activity on which attention is focused, and the surrounding environment (Jones, 1976: 176). Jones (1976: 156) asserts that movement within this “expanded field of attention” is the means whereby change is brought about in the Alexander Technique.

Awareness is vitally important in seeking to change behaviour and gain conscious control over one’s use (Jones, 1976: 167): before one can make an informed, constructive change, it is “essential to take in a situation as fully as possible” (Jones, 1976: 168). As most people don’t pay much attention to their kinaesthetic impressions, they need to learn how to observe themselves in order to gain an awareness of what is happening in their bodies.

Jones, 1976: 138:

The technique…extends the scope of self-observation a long way beyond the visual by organizing the kinesthetic sense on a conscious level. Once you can observe changing relationships between parts of the body and between the body and the environment in terms of levels of tension and relaxation, of lightness and heaviness, as well as of position and movement, you have opened new areas of the self to scientific exploration.

While one’s attention is usually either directed inward to oneself, or outward to the environment, feedback from both the environment and the self is “being recorded in the brain at one and the same time” (Jones, 1976: 177). Through expanding one’s attention, it is possible to amalgamate the two fields, by integrating sensory impressions from both the body and the environment around the head-neck-back relationship as the centre of the field (Jones, 1976: 170). The attention is “focused in such a way that when something in the environment is central, consciousness of the

71 organism is not lost; and when the center is within the organism, consciousness of the environment remains” (Jones, 1976: 171), so that “the interaction of the self and the environment is perceived as an ongoing process” (Jones, 1976: 159).

Jones, 1976: 177:

When the two fields are integrated in this way, the stimulus pattern and the response pattern can be recorded within the same spotlight of attention so that cause-and-effect relations between them can be perceived.

Hence it becomes possible to examine subtle tensional changes that occur within oneself as one interacts with the environment, for instance in reaching for a pencil, or in using a walking stick or a bow as an extension of one’s arm. The “sensations of muscular tension, heaviness, stiffness and their opposites” that are generated in response to the environment are not chaotic or meaningless (Jones, 1976: 177), and becoming aware of the central pattern of stimulus and response within them provides a key for change.

The expanded field of awareness also provides a solution for co-ordinating complex activity. As the “true meaning of co-ordination lies in harmoniously integrating however many factors any situation may require”, eliminating or separating certain factors within the activity does not solve the problem (De Alcantara, 1997: 69). Co- ordination in complex activity can only be achieved through expanding one’s attention to take in all possible aspects of such activity.